


Worth a Thousand Words

by nagi_schwarz



Series: The Oppenheimer Effect [45]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: AU, Crossover, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-18
Updated: 2016-06-18
Packaged: 2018-07-15 17:31:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7231996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the comment_fic prompt: "Any, Any, The words they can't say are expressed through their art."</p><p>Bobbie has some questions for her son, and he answers without words. Bobbie POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Worth a Thousand Words

“How are you doing, Bluebell?” Bobbie sat down beside her son.  
  
He was curled up on the end of the couch, sketchbook on his knees, but his hands were still. “Pretty good, Mom.” He smiled at her tiredly. Thanksgiving dinner in the Community was always an exhausting affair. Evan had moved up the ranks over the years with aplomb, starting off as Nana’s Super Special Wooden Spoon Holder (Natalia held Nana’s favorite whisk) and became First Assistant Table Setter and then Chief Table Mover and then Sous-Chef and finally Chef, and he’d always given it a hundred and ten percent.  
  
No wonder he’d made such a good soldier. Would that he had taken as much good from soldiering as he’d given.  
  
“A son. Two boyfriends. You’ve taken a lot of big steps this year.” Bobbie smiled at him, reached out and smoothed a hand over his hair. He’d always kept his hair short and neat, eschewing the rebellious long locks the other boys in the Community favored, because he didn’t like his hair in his eyes while he painted.  
  
“It’s been a little crazy.”  
  
Bobbie reached out, placed a hand on the corner of his sketchbook. “May I?”  
  
He hesitated for just a fraction of a second before he nodded, and she tugged the sketchbook onto her lap. Flipped it open. She started at the beginning, because she hadn’t had the chance to look through one of his sketchbooks in literally years. She hadn’t thought he’d had much time to draw while he was in active service, and whenever he came home all the children wanted him to make food and play, so he rarely sat down to draw, but the sketchbook was nearly full.  
  
Evan preferred still life and landscapes, architecture, but he had a gift for faces. The earliest sketches were of young men in uniforms in some kind of forested landscape Bobbie couldn’t identify but she guessed was somewhere in Colorado. It looked like the men had set up a camp. Probably a training site or something. There was surveying equipment; she knew Evan had majored in geophysics in college and gone on to get his masters in it, and he’d trained as a surveyor. It was solid, worthy work, even though Bobbie knew with his hands and his mind he could have been a world-class surgeon.  
  
Some of the men looked less like soldiers, slighter and bespectacled, though they wore uniforms. Bobbie didn’t recognize the patches on their uniforms. Even though Evan’s father had been a soldier, Bobbie had never cared to be all that conversant in the ways of the military. What Evan’s father had seen in Vietnam had caused him to take his own life.  
  
Evan had come close, Bobbie knew.  
  
She didn’t realize how close until she turned a page and there was one of the young men Evan had drawn earlier, although Bobbie was hard-pressed to recognize him for a moment. Because he was dead. Spread out like a scarecrow on a wooden cross, covered in blood.  
  
What followed was horrifying.  
  
Bobbie glanced at Evan, but he was gazing out the window toward the ocean.  
  
Bobbie turned the next page with shaking hands. Evan’s unspoken nightmares spilled onto the page. Giant monsters with reptilian faces. The torn corpses of finned eels. Fires, bones, spears and clubs. A pile of uniformed bodies. A cave. A man, shirtless, chest torn open by what looked like vicious claw marks.  
  
Evan, torn open by vicious claw marks. Bobbie recognized the portion of the tattoo on the faceless man’s upper arm. Natalia had given it to him before he’d joined up.  
  
Each picture was worst than the last, blood and claws and teeth and broken men.  
  
What the reptile monsters were a metaphor for, Bobbie wouldn’t ask, and Evan probably couldn’t tell. Something horrible had happened to him. Events all strictly classified. All Bobbie knew was that Evan was one of a handful of men who’d survived the ordeal, and it had almost broken his mind, and he’d been honorably discharged and in therapy for years and still took his pills every day.

Bobbie skipped forward, saw other drawings mingled with the monsters, buildings she recognized as the campus where Evan had gone to get his teaching degree, but she kept going till the monsters stopped and she saw children. Teenagers. JD, looking even younger, though oddly invulnerable compared to his peers. Cam, tired in a wheelchair. John, slouched on a couch playing a guitar. Multiple studies of his hands and hair and ears.

Sketches upon sketches of a large fluffy cat - Oppenheimer.

A hundred and one studies of Rodney McKay’s fascinating mouth.

And then - JD, sitting on the back porch, shirtless, head tipped back, Oppenheimer across his lap.

Cam’s smile.

Tyler, sitting at the kitchen table doing his homework.

Cam leaning back in his wheelchair, JD in his lap, fingers tangled in Cam’s hair as they kissed.

The lean lines of two naked men twined together beneath sheets, hands clasped as they slept, their faces indistinct but every curve and shadow full of love.

Sookie stirring something at the stove in Evan’s kitchen, Tyler beside her.

Bobbie turned to the most recent drawing, of the entire commune gathered in concentric circles around Tyler, who sat closest to the fire, while they sang and wished him well on his journey to find his soul name. When he returned the next year, with the rest of his family, he would get to choose his name.

The joy on everyone’s faces, including Bobbie’s own, had been captured perfectly. She closed the sketchbook and handed it back.

Then she leaned in and kissed her son on the cheek and said, “You are a pretty good boy.”

Evan smiled and put an arm around her shoulders. “Love you, Mom.”

“Love you too, Bluebell.”


End file.
